Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to application servers, and more specifically to providing access via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request methods to services implemented by stateless objects.
Related Art
Objects are often used as programming language constructs for implementing related services, as is well known in the relevant arts. A service is implemented to process requests and to generate corresponding results, which form the basis for responses to the requests. Objects are deployed on application servers, thereby enabling users to access the services from client systems.
Some objects are implemented as stateless objects, implying that the object, once initialized, does not maintain internal state information generated while processing one request, for the purpose of processing a subsequent request. Even if such state information is maintained for other purposes (e.g., log management), the maintained state information is not used for processing of the subsequent request. JavaBeans and Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) are example technologies which permit deployment of stateless objects for processing requests.
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) packets are commonly generated from web browsers executing on client systems, while users at client systems seek to interact with application servers deployed with various objects. Each HTTP packet contains a request method (hereafter referred to as ‘HTTP verb’) identified by a corresponding pre-defined keyword (GET, POST). The keywords are intended to indicate (to the application server) the manner in which the corresponding packets are to be processed.
Access to services may be tied to specific HTTP verbs contained in the packets. For example, in an application server supporting REST (representational state transfer) architecture, a data retrieval service is tied to the GET HTTP verb, while an update service is tied to the POST HTTP verb, as is well known in the relevant arts. Additional details on REST architecture is provided in the document entitled “Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures” by Roy Thomas Fielding, available from University of California at Irvine, School of Information and Computer Sciences.
Aspects of the present disclosure relate to improvements for providing access via HTTP verbs to services implemented by stateless objects.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.